The Pull of the Plateau and the Sway of the Mode: Formal Relationships to Estimate the Pace of Senescence

James W. Vaupel
Additional contact information
James W. Vaupel: University of Southern Denmark

No se7xg, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: BACKGROUND How rapidly does the risk of death due to old age rise with age? It has been hypothesized that this pace of senescence is constant over age, time, and place for every human, today and in the past. Attempts to empirically test this superficially preposterous theory have not been successful—the theory has not yet been proven or disproven. OBJECTIVE Take advantage of theory about heterogeneous populations, and in particular the gamma-Gompertz model, and the knowledge that death rates approach a plateau to develop formal relationships that can be used to estimate the pace of senescence, i.e., the rate of mortality increase with age for individuals because of deterioration with age, and also to estimate how disparate the risk of senescent death is for individuals of the same age. RESULTS Proofs are given for new formal relationships that depend on the level of the mortality plateau, the modal age of death or both. These equations hinge on—and might be useful in testing—the hypothesis that senescent mortality can be described by a gamma-Gompertz model. CONTRIBUTION Discovering that there is (1) an invariant pace of senescence for individuals and (2) an invariant distribution of relative risk of senescent death across individuals—for all humans (and perhaps for some other species)—would be of fundamental physiological, evolutionary, and demographic significance. The formal relationships presented here may further empirical research to find such physiological invariants—or to disprove their existence.

Date: 2022-03-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/621f3807c9d54201c4a2850b/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:se7xg

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/se7xg

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().